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1.5.4-Pilferingapples
Brick!Club: Les Miserables, 1.5.4: Madeleine in Mourning Or, Victor Hugo Has Some Peculiar Ideas About Home Health Care! We find out the Bishop died, but it was ok! Because he went blind first! And that was AWESOME, because his sister was there to take care of him! Seriously. Not “and that was ok.” IT IS AWESOME IT IS A PARADISE ON EARTH HURRAY MONOPOLIZING ANOTHER’S TIME AND ATTENTION WOW. Oh, Hugo. Hugo. No. I’m occasionally blind and rather often in need of intensive physical living assistance, and I am lucky enough to have a devoted partner who uncritically provides that assistance, and it’s great and super loving and all, but just…no. Then again my loving partner isn’t a woman with soft voice and rustling skirts and a lifelong culturally enforced dependence on me, and I’m not a guy who’s been encouraged in every aspect of my life to regard my caregiver as properly and even divinely subservient to me in secular and spiritual authority while apparently being discouraged from learning my own coping skills, so I guess that might make a difference! I am slightly creeped out, here. So let’s move along to death and mourning! The cheery bit! Madeleine’s mourning is sweet, and I love the dowager— “curious by right of age”, what an awesome description- who goes straight up and asks Madeleine about his relation to the Bishop. Curious wimminfolk are just all OVER M-sur-M, and GOOD FOR THEM. I may be meant to cluck in disapproval at OH NO PRYING MINDS, but I’m mostly thinking enormous amounts of grief could have been saved through this story if a few more people had been so unabashedly interested in learning WHAT IS ACTUALLY GOING ON, yeesh. The bit about the Savoyards is good to know (and now I’m fully expecting one of our ficcers to have Gervaise showing up, maybe no longer Petit, in the Nothing Hurts ‘Verse, so we all learn his loss of all his worldly wealth didn’t end up with starving to death or any of the other ills a flat broke homeless kid is prone to face) and while I first thought it seemed tacked on, I can see how it’s a necessary complement to the honoring of the Bishop. Jean ValMadeleine honors the Bishop for showing him how good men can be, setting the standard he’s always trying to approach; he remembers Petit Gervais as a symbol of how far he, himself, can sink. The two of them together were the catalyst for his becoming Super Madeleine, Living Saint of Adventure Town, and it’s only right to show how he keeps them both alive in memory. SAD, but right. Next up: IIIIT’S JAVEEEEERRRRRT! Commentary Gascon-en-exile Fun fact: John Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost, and he dictated the text to his daughters who were taking care of him. That’s a good segue into Baptistine’s moment of achieving the height of a role as a decidedly unconventional angel in the house, because while she provides that morally transcendent atmosphere that women are supposedly naturally good at creating, their relationship here is also uncomfortable rendered in sexual terms. Particularly “''Tout avoir d’elle''" ("To have her completely") and all the hyperbolic expressions of love and constant care…I know 18th and 19th century literature is often characterized as overflowing with sappy sentiment, but this is one example of how strange that sentiment can get. I’ve not much else to add other than implications of elderly brother-sister incest - no thanks are necessary - but I suppose as a Resident Catholic I ought to point out that “odor of sanctity” bit in the first paragraph. This expression and the smell said to accompany it is a Catholic tradition/superstition dating back to the Middle Ages, claiming that the corpse of an especially righteous individual would smell sweet. Scientific reasons for this vary, though more important here is that the odor of sanctity was used as an argument for canonizing the person. Last chapter was Hugo’s means of indirectly canonizing a fictional layman; here he’s directly canonizing a fictional clergyman. Kingedmundsroyalmurder I’ll go through and do a more proper response to this chapter later, when I’ve read it (and the one before. Actually, this is as good a time as any to say that my bricking will be even more sporadic than usual for a bit here because finals and projects and I refuse to turn something that was supposed to be fun (and still is fun) into an obligation that just adds more stress. I should be back to regular participation two weeks from today, roughly.) But I’m reblogging this now to officially open up the Nothing Hurts/Miserables with friends AU to everyone. If people want I can start a page/blog to keep the details straight, but it’s a sandbox that everyone gets to play in. (Though if you could keep Abject Misery out of it that would be much appreciated, since the whole point of the ‘verse is to counteract the Abject Misery of canon.) On that note, might one of you visual artist types be persuaded to draw me tiny!Cosette with chocolate all over her face in return for the fic of your choice? Pilferingapples (reply to Kingedmundsroyalmurder) Please take whatever time you need, k.e.! We can’t have you burning out, and Brick!club is waaaaay voluntary duty. Just passing along the message from one of our best and brightest- Nothing Hurtsverse is totally !club property!XD And I will get right on that tiny!Cosette, as soon as I finish…a few dozen other things. BUT YES, time for fluff!